As the title suggests the book is on entrepreneurial innovations and how such innovations or start-ups have helped the nation Israel become wealthy and developed, and how such innovations have helped other countries as well.
The reason I read such books are for comparing them with our own country India and to have an idea on what exactly went wrong here that we haven't achieved the same success as other first-world countries.
I'll brief some points of what I have understood-
1.) Israel has become a successful capitalist country. Perhaps this is the main thing that differentiates a developed country from a developing (read: still largely backward) one. Capitalism means the increasing of wealth through free market economy or free trade, one which has minimum government restrictions and taxations. This drives the citizens of the country to start new businesses without much worries regarding paper-work.
India on the other hand has always been a socialist country. Even the preamble of our constitution states that we are a socialist country. The word socialist was interpolated and added in the preamble and constitution only in the 1980s. We may not realize it but this is one of the reasons why India isn't a developed country yet! In a socialist economy, there is hardly any free market trade- that is, if there is any of it at all! It's a command economy where the government owns all the means of production. It simply means that the citizens cannot have their own startups.
NOW.. India, even though socialist, has been a mixed economy from the 90s. But we still haven't gone full pro-capitalist yet! Even though we do hear of startups in India (only from post-mid 2000s), most of them aren't nearly as successful as, say from, Israel or any other developed country. Only recently has the Indian government started privatizing many state-owned enterprises and public services like Air India and BSNL, which can turn out to be a good thing for the long run.
2.) Anyway... relating to the first point above.. pro-capitalist policies in Israel was boosted up by their government by introducing this thing called "Yozma". It's a Hebrew word that means "innovation". The government of Israel simply encouraged it's citizens to innovate more and more things. The government would take the risk of funding the private innovations if necessary by giving loans and incentives. Plus minimum tax cuts and regulatory paperwork.
This automatically gave Israelis the freedom to start new businesses based on new (and wonderful) ideas relating to their daily problems.
3.) But you might ask what was the benefit of all this? Many. First, like I said above, the country became rich. Second, it helped in the development of it's own indigenous healthcare and defense. Apart from this it shows how these innovations are shared with countries that need help and this in turn proves to be beneficial for the world at large.
The book gives some examples of successful Israeli startups- these include the Hatzalah Ambucycle and Iron Dome. I'll brief about these two examples (there are many more in the book) below in the fourth and last point.
4.) Hatzalah Ambucycle is an invention of this Israeli genius entrepreneur named Eli Beer who innovated a quick solution for patients who are in a medical emergency. As we all know Israel is at the end of constant aggression by Palestine. Bomb blasts by Palestinian terrorists is a common thing in Israel. Eli Beer one such blast since he was at quite a distance from the explosion but that incident changed his life and drove him to his innovation. He saw multiple dead bodies and people who were dying and needed immediate medical attention. But it would take hours for the ambulances to arrive at the spot. So what he did was he thought about building emergency ambulances on motorcycles. The scooters or motorcycles would have an entire medical kit where the medical workers could ride within minutes and reach the spot of emergency without being hurdled by the traffic or anything. The service was similar to how Uber or Ola work. The person in emergency or some other person nearby would just ask for a quick help through signal on the Hatzalah App and an Ambucycle would be there on the spot in a few minutes. This innovation saved lives and made Eli Beer (and all employees under his company) rich as well.
The other example is the Iron Dome missile battery which has led to safety of Israeli citizens, especially those living in bordering cities and villages. Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah would often keep launching missile rockets from their territory on Israeli territory, which would put several Israeli civilian lives at risk. So the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and the MoD (Ministry of Defense) encouraged the citizens of Israel to think about any idea to solve this problem, and they would sponsor that idea by funding it. This guy named Chanoch Levine formed a team of engineers and scientists he knew for the project Iron Dome. It was a system of automated counter-missiles. If a rocket missile would come from the other side of the border, the Iron Dome missiles would immediately get launched through computed sensation and knock those incoming Palestinian missiles of.. resulting in the Israeli territories having no damage at all!
5.) There were failures as well as successes while innovating such things. But the reason why the entrepreneurs kept improving and trying, and were finally successful, was because of the Government of Israel encouraging them do so.
Would it even be possible to achieve such feats without government support?
Thankfully such policies have been started by the Indian government as well recently, but we still have a long way to go... but it wouldn't be very difficult to achieve it soon if the Government and the people will to achieve success and work for it efficiently!
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